نقد زبان و ادبیات خارجی

نقد زبان و ادبیات خارجی

They Never Listen”: Indigenous River Knowledge and Colonial Misrecognition in Anita Heiss’s River of Dreams

نوع مقاله : مقاله علمی پژوهشی

نویسندگان
Lale Masiha 1
Pouya Aghaverdizadeh 2
Sarina Moradi 3
1 Assistant Professor of English Literature, Tabriz University
2 Department of English Literature and Language, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign languages, University of Tabriz, Iran.
3 Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, Uuniversity of Tabriz, 29-E-Bahman Blvd., Tabriz, Iran.
10.48308/clls.2026.245846.1503
چکیده
This article examines Anita Heiss's historical novel Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (2021), which fictionalizes the Great Flood of Gundagai of 1852, as a critical intervention in blue humanities scholarship on water and relationality. Drawing on Vanessa Watts's concept of Place-Thought and Miranda Fricker's theory of testimonial injustice, the article argues that the novel distinguishes between Wiradyuri river knowledge that is spoken and knowledge that is recognized, showing that repeated warnings issued to settlers before the flood are refused not for lack of clarity but because Wiradyuri epistemic authority over the river has been foreclosed in advance. The resulting catastrophe is read not as natural disaster but as the material outcome of a colonial epistemology structurally unable to recognize Indigenous ecological expertise as expertise. The article contends that River of Dreams does not simply illustrate this relational understanding of water but demonstrates, in human terms, what it costs to theorize relation while refusing to listen to the knowledge already practiced by those who hold it.
کلیدواژه‌ها
blue humanities
epistemic injustice
Indigenous water knowledge
River of Dreams
settler colonialism
testimonial injustice
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